Thirteen Sites for Making a Spectacular Book Cover (Updated)
A book’s cover is often the first thing a reader sees when they find your book for the first time. You never have a second chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes, which is why many would suggest you hire a professional to design your book covers.
But some authors have the skill to DIY or want to learn about cover design by doing so they can work better with the designers they hire, so here are thirteen sites, services, and apps that you can use to make an awesome book cover.
Sidenote: Before you use any of these tools, you should read up on good cover design techniques.
There are many similar tools out there, so if you know of one not on this list please leave a comment.
Which one do you use?
Update for June 2020: I was making graphics today when i remembered this post needed to be updated. I have actually used several of these tools since this post was published in 2017, but for the most part I still use Canva. That app now has even very nice templates you can use as a starting point than it did in 2017.
Comments
14 Sites for Making a Spectacular Book Cover | The Passive Voice | A Lawyer's Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing and Traditional Publishing April 21, 2017 um 2:04 pm
[…] Link to the rest at The Digital Reader […]
Maria (BearMountainBooks) April 22, 2017 um 10:39 am
I’ve used Createspace before and know a couple of authors who have used it to create a back cover (after paying for the front cover, which generally does not include the back cover in the price, it’s a nice, cheap option that gets the job done.) They do a decent job and when I used it five or so years ago, they had various abilities–you can upload some artwork and place it in a cover design, you can select the entire cover, you can just do the back/wraparound. They have various fonts to choose from. I do my own covers now and I even have some pre-mades in (mostly) the cozy genre on my blog because they are harder to come by. For anyone who can afford it, there are some really awesome cover designers out there. There are quite decent pre-mades on various sites too (select the cover and the artist will add your name and title for a pretty low price).
I make my own for a lot of reasons: Price, I can change it if I want to take it in a different direction, I can use the art to make bookmarks or postcards without having to contact an artist, I can resize for print/audio, etc. It gives me a lot more freedom than I’d have if I hired someone. Is it as good as the best? No. But on my budget, it works. (It also took years of learning and studying off and on as I needed new techniques. Not for the faint of heart!)
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[…] If your beginning to panic about your cover page, don’t! You do not have to be crazy and design your own cover pages. I had the crazy idea of painting mine, but there are plenty of websites that you can go to that allow you to do it online. Below are the top 2: […]